CHAPTER 49
T
HE COLORED SPORTING HOUSE THAT MAUREEN HAD ORDERED
Fat Fanny to drive Othella and Ruby to was just what they expected. Like so many other things in the South associated with black folks, it was about as low-level as it could be. Even though it was a fairly large house, and had a huge front yard with a gate, it was so old and shabby it looked like the next strong storm would be its last. The shutters on the windows were rattling like snakes, and there wasn’t even a breeze. There was no glider, settee, or high-backed chairs with pillows on the seats on the front porch for the residents and guests to lounge on like at the brothels in the District. There was only a cheap-looking rocking chair with a flat pillow in the seat. Next to it were two empty barrels turned upside down. A Bible, with its cover missing, sat on top of one of the barrels next to a spittoon running over with thick brown slime and huge clumps of dried snuff.
Fat Fanny parked in front of the house behind a caravan of other dusty old jalopies. She left the motor running as she tumbled out. She beckoned with her gnarled hand for Ruby and Othella to follow as she strutted up the walkway, kicking empty cans out of her way. A plump rooster strutted by as Fat Fanny stomped up on the porch and knocked on the front door. The door eased open and a big eye peered out. “It’s me, Emma. Fat Fanny from the District. Miss Mo’reen sent me ’cause she want to collect on one of them favors you owe her.”
The door eased open with a loud creak. Whoever was on the other side opened it just wide enough for Fat Fanny to squeeze through.
Othella looked at Ruby as they remained outside at the bottom of the front porch steps, their feet surrounded by chicken and dog droppings.
“I don’t know about you, but I ain’t about to stay in this place,” Ruby told Othella. “I’d rather let them put me
under
a jailhouse and melt the key.”
Before Othella could respond, the door swung open. Fat Fanny and a tall, brown-skinned woman with dark brown freckles all over her face, neck, and hands piled out. The brown-skinned woman was breathing hard and wiping sweat off her face with the tail of her yellow apron.
“Y’all clean?” the woman asked, looking down her nose at Othella. When she looked at Ruby, she stared for a moment, then she pulled out a pair of glasses from her apron pocket and held them up to her eyes. “What happened to you, girl? You look like you been run over by a tractor.”
“A dog attacked me,” Ruby said without hesitation.
“Well, I hope that dog didn’t have no rabies.”
“He didn’t,” Ruby muttered.
The woman didn’t seem satisfied with Ruby’s explanation about the injuries on her face, but she decided to overlook that for the time being. “I
guess
I could use y’all for a few years,” she said, not sounding too sure of herself.
“This is Emma Metcalfe,” Fat Fanny introduced. “She’s goin’ to look after y’all for a while. Be nice,” she added, forcing herself to chuckle.
“Before I even let you two young she-monkeys in my house, we need to get somethin’ straight right now. Just because y’all been doin’ your business for the white folks, don’t think y’all no better than the girls that’s been workin’ for me for years. Y’all ain’t got nothin’ they ain’t got, so don’t think your coochie is worth more than theirs. Four dollars a trick to start, and if you work out good, and I don’t get too many complaints about y’all from my tricks, and if y’all still here by the end of the year, you’ll get six dollars a trick.”
Ruby and Othella looked dumbfounded. Fat Fanny spoke for them because they both looked too stunned to do it themselves. “They made a lot more than that at Miss Mo’reen’ house.”
“This ain’t Mo’reen’s house!” Emma hollered. “What’s wrong with you, Fat Fanny?”
“There ain’t nothin’ wrong with me, Emma. But be reasonable. These two girls are way younger than all of them old hags you got workin’ for you now. For that reason alone, you ought to cut ’em some slack. Besides, they are kind of new in town and just want to turn a few tricks to get enough money to get ’em a place and stuff, see.”
“Can we talk to you in private?” Ruby said to Fat Fanny, tugging on her sleeve.
“Anything you got to say, you can say in front of me. You ain’t goin’ to start out by keepin’ no secrets from me,” Emma snarled, her teeth looking sharper to Ruby each time she opened her mouth.
“That’s fine with me, sister woman,” Ruby said in a casual voice, her brow furrowed. “Fat Fanny, can you drive me and Othella back across town?” She paused, and when she spoke again, it sounded like she had carefully rehearsed her words. “I wouldn’t allow a dog I didn’t like to stay in this butt hole of a place.”
Emma clicked her teeth and gave Ruby and Othella the meanest look she could manage, and then she went back into her house and slammed the door shut. Othella noticed the curtains moving in every single one of the windows upstairs.
“Ruby’s right,” Othella said, shaking her head when she saw the Emma woman’s angry face appear in the window on the side of the door. A man who looked like a baboon lumbered up the walkway, grinning and looking at Othella’s legs first, then Ruby’s breasts.
“Yeehow! Look like Christmas is comin’ early this year,” the man swooned, stopping in front of Othella, licking his lips. “Y’all new around here?” he asked, looking from Othella to Fat Fanny and then Ruby, still licking his lips.
Without a word, Fat Fanny stumbled off the porch back to her car, with Ruby and Othella close behind. They remained silent as they drove off, and didn’t speak again until ten minutes later.
“Mama Ruby, what did you and Miss Mo’reen do to Wally to make him so mad?” Fat Fanny couldn’t stop herself from asking. “It don’t matter now, so you can tell me. I think I deserve to know.”
“Me and Miss Mo’reen tricked him into thinkin’ I was a virgin,” Ruby answered without hesitation. “Him and a bunch of other men. They paid big money to bust my cherry. Or what they thought was my cherry.”
Othella gasped. Fat Fanny almost ran up on the sidewalk.
“And how in the world did y’all manage to do that? I been in this business for years, and I thought I knew every trick in the book. I guess I don’t,” Fat Fanny said. “Do I want to know this one?
“Take my word for it, Fat Fanny. You don’t want to know,” Othella told her.
“I’ll take your word for it,” Fat Fanny said with a grimace on her face. They remained silent for another five minutes before Fat Fanny spoke again. “Y’all better make up your minds where you want me to drop y’all off at soon. I’ve been drivin’ around for the longest time, and I’ve spent a whole day’s pay up on gas already,” Fat Fanny complained.
“We’ll pay you for the gas,” Ruby said, looking anxiously out the window from the front seat of Fat Fanny’s car.
“And if I don’t get on back to the house soon, Miss Mo’reen might have my shit all packed up and ready to go like she done y’all. Now if the train station ain’t really where y’all want to go, or the bus station, where is it we off to now? The only other place that I can think of, is a house on Creely Street run by another colored lady named Isabel Cooper. She’s a real nasty piece of work if ever there was one. She’s way meaner than Mazel.”
“Don’t take us to no more whorehouses!” Othella erupted.
Fat Fanny shook her head. “It ain’t no whorehouse. She’s kin to Mazel some kind of way, and she’s been takin’ in strays for years.”
“We got money,” Ruby said. “We can pay for our room and board.”
“That’s somethin’ you need to discuss with her,” Fat Fanny suggested. “I only met her a few times, and I just know about her by what Mazel claims. This woman even takes in dangerous colored felons just gettin’ out of prison until they can find their way. Rapists mostly. That’s why Mazel don’t have nothin’ to do with the woman no more. She’s scared one of them lusty ex-cons might lose control and grab her. In case y’all don’t know it, Mazel had to have a piece of her female equipment removed after her last child. She’s as good as dead down below.”
The last thing in the world that Ruby wanted to discuss was Mazel’s sex life. “Keep drivin’,” she ordered. “The first open-all-night place you see, drop us off there. We can sit there for a while, all night if we have to.”
“Just make sure it’s a place that they allow colored folks in,” Othella added. “I ain’t in the mood to deal with no segregation rigmarole right now.”
Fat Fanny finally reached her breaking point. It was dark by now and her car was almost out of gas. “This is it! Y’all get out of my car!” she hollered, stopping in the middle of what looked like a deserted neighborhood. “Go behind this warehouse and keep walkin’ till you get to a field. There’s a long-runnin’ carnival there that’s open all night.”
It was the same carnival that one of Othella’s clients had told her about. They would soon find out that the man had told the truth about the owner, a white man named Mr. Peterson, being the kind of person who would “hire anybody,” because that’s just what happened.
With their suitcases in hand and despair on their faces, they approached the carnival owner literally begging Peterson for work and a place to sleep. He hired them on the spot, no questions asked about age, experience, work history, or criminal background. Several workers had suddenly quit the day before, so Mr. Peterson was so desperate he would have hired a goat.
That night, Ruby and Othella moved into a small, but clean and neatly organized trailer that they had to share with a middle-aged black woman named Lilly Parker. Lilly did some cooking and cleaning for Mr. Peterson and a few of the other carnival employees. She resembled the mean-spirited Mazel, but she was a lot friendlier. The first night, she offered to scratch and grease Ruby’s and Othella’s scalps and braid their hair, telling them how much they reminded her of her own children.
“I think this place might be just what we need for the time bein’,” Ruby told Othella after Lilly had finished their hair and turned in for the night.
“I hope it is, Mama Ruby. I hope it is,” Othella said.
That night they slept better than they’d slept all week.
The next morning they began their new jobs, which included scooping up elephant and monkey manure, hauling water to and from the animal cages, and selling balloons.
“I didn’t even know they had animal acts in carnivals. I thought animal acts was only in a circus,” Ruby commented, scratching her head.
“Well, this carnival’s got animal acts,” Othella sighed tiredly.
At the end of the next day, when Othella balked about cleaning up the animals’ manure, Ruby told her, “We could have done a lot worse.”
“And we probably will. Mr. Peterson told me that the carnival is only goin’ to be here for another couple of weeks. Then they are goin’ on to Florida where they come from, and will stay there for the whole season.” Othella gave Ruby time to process this information. “But . . .” she began again, pausing as a weak smile appeared on her face.
“But what, Othella?”
“He said he never has much luck keepin’ people on his payroll for long. Miss Lilly done already told him that she’s goin’ to Chicago in a few days so he said that if me and you want to go with the carnival and take over some of her chores, too, we could,” Othella revealed. “He said he’d even overlook the fact that we still underage and colored.”
“Florida? Hmmm. Now that don’t sound like such a bad idea to me. I been thinkin’ that we should leave this state anyway before we run into somebody we know and they find out what we been up to. The last thing I want is for folks to find out I sold myself in a whorehouse.”
“And don’t forget about what you done to Glenn. And to Wally Yoakum in his own house, in front of me and all of them white witnesses,” Othella reminded.
“Well, that too, I guess.”
“I’ll tell Mr. Peterson we want to travel to Florida with the carnival.”
“I don’t know about that, Othella. I have to think about it.”
“What’s there to think about? Either you come with me or you don’t.”
“I told my folks that I was goin’ to be livin’ in New Orleans. They didn’t like it, but at least they knew I wouldn’t be that far away from home. Now you talkin’ about draggin’ me even farther away from them.”
“This is what bein’ a grown woman is about, Ruby Jean,” Othella hissed. Ruby hated when she was called by her given name, especially by Othella. She’d made it clear to her and everybody else that she wanted to be referred to as Mama Ruby. Othella read Ruby like a Bible, so she knew why there was such a tight-lipped, hard look on her face. “I meant to call you ‘Mama Ruby’ like you told me. . . .”
The hardness immediately disappeared from Ruby’s face, but the tightened lips remained a few seconds longer.
Finally, Ruby chuckled and shook her head. “Othella, I know you are real upset and stuff about gettin’ me involved in a whorehouse and all. But to tell you the truth, I don’t want to spend my best years cleanin’ up elephant shit neither.” She looked at her hands, palms first. Then she turned them over, frowning like she’d just sucked on a rotten lemon. “My hands ought to be burpin’ a baby or givin’ my husband nightly foot massages by now, not spreadin’ manure. I sure as hell don’t like this situation,” she whined.